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Anna North writes in the NY Times about Star Trek's "post-economic" system, in which money no longer exists and anything you want can be made in a replicator, essentially for free. According to Manu Saadia, the author of "Trekonomics," a forthcoming book about the economics of the Star Trek universe, when everything is free, objects will no longer be status symbols. Success will be measured in achievements, not in money: "Instead of working to become more wealthy, you work to increase your reputation," says Saadia. "You work to increase your prestige. You want to be the best captain or the best scientist in the entire galaxy. And many other people are working to do that, as well. It's very meritocratic"
In a time of rising inequality and stagnating wages, a world where everyone's needs are met and people only work if they feel like it seems pretty far away but a post-scarcity economy is actually far more within reach than the technological advances for which Star Trek is better known. If productivity growth continues, Saadia believes there will be much more wealth to go around in a few hundred years' time. In general, society might look more like present-day New Zealand, which he sees as less work-obsessed than the United States: "You work to live rather than the other way round." Wealthy retirees today also already live an essentially post-money existence, "traveling and exploring and deepening their understanding of the world and being generally happy." According to Saadia we're beginning to get a few hints of what the post-money, reputation-based economy might look like. "If you look at things like Instagram, Vine, places where people put a huge amount of work into basically just gaining a certain amount of reputation, it's fascinating to see. Or even Wikipedia, for that matter. The Internet has begun to give us a hint of how much people will work, for no money, just for reputation."
Original Submission
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2015, @02:46PM
Agreed, but not for the same reasons.
Regardless of how good 3d printing is today, the moment you want 10,000 or 1,000,000 identical copies of something, conventional manufacturing; injection molding, stamping, etc; is essentially always cheaper. If everyone could afford 3d printed or "replicator-made" stuff, then you have the star trek economy that you're looking for.
But, given a choice between a 3d printed chainmail-style shirt for $3,000 or a regular cotton shirt for $5; a 3d printed cooking pot for $1,000 or a regular cooking pot for $35; a 3d printed computer chip with a clockspeed of 0.00002 ghz and 0.000005 gigabytes of memory for $10 dollars, or a conventionally manufactured computer chip with a clockspeed of 1 ghz and 0.5 gig of memory for $10 dollars; I'll continue to pick the conventionally manufactured stuff.
And anyone who can't afford replicator-made prices ? They're probably working minimum wage scrubbing gold-plated toilets of the 1 percenters, or homeless, jobless, and starving.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Sunday July 12 2015, @08:09PM
Regardless of how good 3d printing is today
Keyword highlighted above: today. Go back a few years and no one was talking about 3d printing. Give it 50 years. Then what?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2015, @10:42PM
Sure, but by then traditional manufacturing will also improve to mass produce better products for cheaper. Economies of scale and scope will always exist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @02:47AM
Alternatively, "traditional manufacturing" will be exclusively done with 3d printers.